Tretiak

It also precludes the fact that prior to State formation and complex agriculture, tribal society wasn't exactly all that peaceful either. Violence is fundamental to human behavior.

Well. The person you replied to is a moron IMO, but I can kind of see what he's saying. 'Decent' can 'potentially' be a reasonable standard by seeing the way that people vote with their feet. American citizens aren't looking to escape the US to get into Afghanistan, but plenty of Afghan's would love to escape into the American heartland if they had the opportunity. 'Godless secular republic', all things considered.

What he wouldn't understand is that the US was a leading forerunner that explains why that country remains an undeveloped shithole in the first place.

One thing western liberals will never understand is that once you branch out into the world, and really have the opportunity to live and experience the customs of difference societies, you'll quickly realize that different countries have 'vastly' different ideas about what they believe their relationship to the government should be.

I'll never forget the British chick on some UK television program, that was stumped by an ISIS sympathizer in the UK when she asked him "what happens to most people who don't want to obey the law in your country?," and he replied back, "what happens to most people who don't want to obey the law of Britain? 'They get arrested'." She froze on the panel and got dead silent, before pivoting to something else.

A war can be considered legal if it meets the criteria and conditions set forth by international law.

Practically every war throughout history violates that standard. Are there people out there who are truly this naive?

… where is all the evidence you speak of that that Russia invading Ukraine is somehow justified?…

Did you even read what I wrote?:

Nobody here has explicitly said what Russia did wasn’t illegal or immoral, because it is.

Apparently not.

Take a mental journey and imagine yourself in the same position of the victims of war, then how wrong it is to somehow try to justify any of it.

I have. Have you? Did Putin not make peaceful overtures to Ukraine? Did he not want to come to a mutually beneficial arrangement? Did Ukraine not 'agree' to the Minsk Accords?

I agree.

What are states compromised of if not the very individuals they’re tasked with representing? Seems to me like you’re trying to use some very tortured logic to have it both ways. If Utah voted in Mormonism as the official state religion, I certainly wouldn’t like it nor want to live there. Nor would I ‘have’ to live there. But that comes with the territory of allowing states (not the federal government), to vote in an official religion, ‘if that’s what the people vote for’. And you’re not at liberty to deny them that. Your basic rights as a citizen you’re still entitled to under federal law, and no state can take that away from you.

Now if you don’t care about representative democracy, then fine; fair enough. But don’t hide your argument behind a pretense about how a political belief you agree with supersedes the will of the population, ‘even if it were opposed by the will and dictates of the citizens and they held otherwise’, and then claim to care about the principle, even if as a counter-factual. Of course I don’t like or respect ’every’ politician, but that isn’t the point of the argument. And I think the word “reform” is doing you far too much work, in disguising the intent of liberals who in reality, would desire to remake the entire political system in their own image. Even as a pretty far right leaning conservative (though not Republican) myself, I wouldn’t desire that, even on my side of the aisle.

I don’t agree with most of the domestic policies in the US, but I respect freedom and liberty enough to hold to it, even when the outcomes it produces oppose my political beliefs; by 180 degrees. If you abandon the principle which says states as experiments are permitted to adopt an official religion, should they choose to follow that path, you’re not someone that cares about freedom and liberty. Full stop.

This same argument is at play even among most liberal idiots who hated Donald Trump, but still refused to condemn the western democratic values and process that put someone like him into office. They either hold to the ideal, or they’re (more plausibly) too stupid to recognize such an explicit contradiction in their own beliefs.

Reminds me of the term “defend forward” in the NSA’s lexicon. Made me laugh my ass off when I first heard it.

Good perhaps according to your political sentiments. But that’s no different than anyone who scores a point in favor of what they deem to be progressive. “Anything that goes the way I want it to is a good thing.” Hardly a principled position if one cares about freedom and liberty.

And as I linked to, that’s a modern political conception we have that historically wasn’t there and was wholly unfounded.

Indeed. Always reminds me of Chomsky's description of how the west characterizes terms like 'terrorism'. It's the "heads I win, tails you lose," version of foreign policy.